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‘Pox Parties’ in the Age of Facebook

The offer – for lollipops infected with chickenpox virus – appeared on Facebook last month and quickly circulated among parents who oppose vaccinating their children against diseases.

“I have PayPal and plenty of spit and suckers,” the message read. “It works too because that’s how we got it! Our round was FedEx’d from Arizona. We’ve spread cooties to Cookeville, Knoxville and Louisiana!”

Other parents on the same message board posted requests for shipments of a variety of chickenpox-infected items – towels, children’s clothes, rags. By getting their children to touch the contaminated items or suck on tainted candy, they believe their children will get the stronger immunity that surviving a full-blown natural infection of chickenpox affords, without the hazards they say come with vaccines.

The posts advertising the infected lollipops have since been taken down, and there is no evidence that anyone actually bought them. But public health experts warn the practice is misguided, and dangerous.

“I think it’s an incredibly bad idea, whether you’re getting it from a lollipop or somewhere else,” said Dr. Rafael Harpaz, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Chickenpox can cause severe disease and death. Before the vaccine was available, we were approaching 100 children who died every year in the United States. You’re basically playing a game of Russian roulette.”

This month, law enforcement officials began clamping down. Jerry E. Martin, the United States attorney in Nashville, where the tainted lollipops were advertised at $50 for overnight delivery, issued a warning last week that sending infected items “through the flow of commerce” was a federal crime, punishable by up to 20 years in jail.

So-called pox parties, where parents would arrange play dates with infected children, were practiced before the introduction of the varicella, or chickenpox, vaccine in 1995. Now some parents are turning to Facebook and other social media sites, using the Internet to facilitate the exposure of their children to chickenpox and other diseases like measles, mumps and rubella. The parents say they would rather their children acquire these diseases and develop natural immunity than run the risk of vaccine side effects.

On Facebook the groups go by names like “Chicken Pox Party Line” and “Find a Pox Party.” As one group notes on its Facebook page, “Consider this your ‘registry’ so that if any other members have an infected kid, you’ll be notified and have the option of setting up a pox playdate.”

Kari Campbell Soto, a mother of four young children in San Bernadino County, founded one of the groups, “Chicken Pox Party – Southern California,” about six months ago. It now has several dozen members. Ms. Campbell Soto said she recently took her children to a play date at the home of a young girl who had chickenpox, but her children did not get sick. She then noted on the group’s page that she was looking for another infected child in the area, or an adult with shingles, which is caused by the same virus, varicella zoster.

“You can get chickenpox from someone with shingles,” she said. “I have made the other members aware that that’s what I’m looking for. I think that would be another avenue to go down.”

Although she works in the medical field, Ms. Campbell Soto said she became distrustful of vaccines after one of her children, who was vaccinated regularly, developed a neurological disorder as a toddler.

“I feel that I have a vaccine-injured child; that’s what led me to go down this road,” she said. She added that she and others in her group disagreed with sending chickenpox through the mail. “It puts a negative light on our crusade,” she said. “We’re all aware that it’s illegal to do that.”

Whether the varicella virus would even survive in the mail is unclear, but a major concern is that they would carry not only varicella but “God knows what else,” said Dr. Walt Orenstein, associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center and a member of the committee on infectious diseases of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“Whatever is in the mouths of those kids at the time can also go on to those lollipops,” he said. “I’d be concerned about other bacteria or strep or whatever is in the throats of kids who sucked those lollipops.”

Dr. Orenstein said he was also concerned that parents were deliberately looking to infect their children. Chickenpox is rarely thought of as a severe disease, he said, but it can lead to serious complications, as well as pneumonia and other infections that crop up when children scratch their blisters. It also raises the likelihood of shingles, a painful eruption of blisters that can occur years after a case of chicken pox and typically affects adults, he said.

“The vaccine virus is far less associated with shingles than the wild virus,” he said. “But my hope is not to have children suffer needlessly when they can be protected from this virus. It is not a trivial disease.”